This invention relates to visitor stations of the types employed in jails, prisons and similar institutions for the purpose of permitting visual and voice communication between a visitor and an inmate, or between similar persons disposed on opposite sides of a wall within such an institution, while at the same time prohibiting physical contact and the passage of drugs and other materials between such persons.
Prior U.S. patents disclosing visitor stations of the aforesaid general type include the following: U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,259,751, 2,057,239, 2,045,424, 1,977,719, 1,869,266, 1,741,917, 1,697,445, 1,689,172, 1,656,910, 1,635,650, 1,629,371 and 1,562,811.
Visitor stations of the above described type are subject to a number of requirements which to some extent are inconsistent or in conflict with one another. The visitor stations should of course adequately fulfill their basic function of permitting good visual and voice communication between persons using the same, and should at the same time provide such users with at least a minimal degree of privacy and convenience. In the latter regard, for instance, the visitor stations should provide an area usable for writing purposes by an attorney or similar visitor. On the other hand, the visitor stations must not permit physical contact or the passage of narcotics or other materials between users of the station, and must otherwise satisfy the usually-rigid security requirements of the institutions within which they are employed. Lastly, but also quite importantly, the visitor stations should be highly durable and economical to fabricate, install and maintain. Heretofore the cost of providing visitor stations in prisons and similar institutions has usually been quite large. Such high cost has been attributable in large part and in many instances to the visitor stations' lacking any significant degree of versatility of utilization, which required that they be individually "tailor made" on the institutional job-site, by relatively highly-skilled and thus highly-paid workmen who therefore had to travel to and be present at such job-site, to meet the particular size-specifications of each institution wherein a visitor station was to be installed.